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New B737-800NG will fly on the carrier’s three times weekday daily flights

Lot Polish has introduced new aircraft on its London to Warsaw route. The new B737-800 NG will fly on the carrier’s three times weekday daily flights, starting with one flight daily and moving to all three flights by June at the latest as another two B737-800NGs are brought into service. The new aircraft seat 186 passengers (20 more than in the existing B737-400 aircraft currently operated by the airline) in three classes: economy, premium economy and business.

The aircraft will also be on flights form Warsaw to Paris, Madrid, Tel Aviv and Astana.

Rafał Milczarski, LOT’s CEO, said the new aircraft represented a significant increase in capacity on the London route and was part of an ambitious growth plan for the airline which would see it flying 10.5 million passengers in 2010, up from 4.3 million in 2015. The growth this year is 1.1 million passengers as the airline recovers from a difficult period,

Much of the growth is re-establishing connections that were in existence before LOT’s problems in 2011-13.

The capacity increase is significant because the airline is currently operating the route with a combination of B737-400 and Embraer 195 aircraft. LOT CEO Rafał Milczarski, said he believed that the London to Warsaw route

“…can be made much more successfully financially. There is demand for our services. Heathrow is a convenient aircraft and offers convenient. I can’t rule out that we will be adding more capacity though I have nothing to announce today. It’s a great shame that the two traditional network carriers of the Uk and Poland now offer so little of the overall capacity between Poland and UK. It is a significant market for LCCs though, of course.”

Lot is also pushing onward connections to destinations as diverse as Astana and Tokyo to Seoul and Beijing.

“We are fantastically well located for the strategy we are going to implement.” says Rafał Milczarski, LOT’s CEO, emphasising that Poland is located in Central Europe rather than Eastern Europe.

The number of destinations will grow from 41 in 2015 to 88 in 2020, with a fleet (by then) of 88 aircraft. Poland has a population of 38 million, with eight cities with significant airports.

Japanese carrier All Nippon Airways (ANA) and LOT Polish Airlines have expanded their codeshare partnership to now encompass domestic routes operated by ANA, starting December 1 this year.

Under the widened agreement, passengers can now fly using LOT flight numbers between destinations in Europe, including Warsaw in Poland, and regions in Japan, notably Sapporo (CTS), Sendai and Fukuoka. Previously, the codeshare agreement between the two carriers had only enabled travellers to fly using an ANA flight number on connecting flights from cities in Europe served by ANA to Warsaw.

Both ANA and LOT are Star Alliance members and have an existing mileage services partnership agreement, enabling members of each airline’s mileage programmes to earn miles and use rewards on all flights operated by either carrier.

Details of the new codeshare flights are as follows (all times local):

Polish airline LOT will connect Warsaw with the US West Coast from April, 2017.

Although as yet there has been no official announcement, Business Traveller can reveal that Warsaw-based LOT will launch a four times a week non-stop service between Warsaw and Los Angeles on April 4.

The flight will be operated by a three-class B787 configured for business, premium economy and economy.

LOT would appear to be following in the footsteps of Vienna-based Austrian Airlines who recently announced that it too would launch flights to the US West Coast this coming April. (see Online News, September 16, 2016)

So Austrian Airlines will be providing the only non-stop link between Central Europe and Los Angeles while LOT will operate the only non-stop link (to the US West Coast) from a city in the former Eastern Europe.

Both routes can only succeed provided each airline sources sufficient connecting passengers.

We have already explained how Austrian Airlines (see link above) intends to do this.

Now LOT will be hoping that passengers will transfer at Warsaw when originating from Polish domestic points (such as Gdansk, Wroclaw and Krakow) and other cities in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States.

But LOT will not have the simple scheduling as seen at Austrian Airlines.

It is true that having different timings on some days increases the number of connection possibilities. But it may spell confusion for the point-to-point passengers.

On some days LOT departs Warsaw in the late morning and arrives in Los Angeles in the mod-afternoon. The return flight departs at tea-time to arrive back into Warsaw at lunchtime the following day.

On other days you leave Warsaw in the afternoon, arrive Los Angeles in the evening, return in the late evening and land back in Warsaw in the early evening of the next day.

So it’s a win-win for passengers. But the aviation industry must be worried about a possible transatlantic seat glut in 2017.

Together both Austrian Airlines and LOT will be adding over 2,000 each-way seats per week to just one, as yet unproven, route.

Traditionally these passengers would have flown (as they do right now) via one of several hubs in the Western part of mainland Europe.

For example, if bound for Los Angeles, it would be logical for LOT passengers to hop between Warsaw and Frankfurt from where they would continue non-stop with fellow Star Alliance carriers like Lufthansa or United.